1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming system, in which a desired foil image is transferred on a desired toner image on base material on which an image has been formed.
2. Description of Related Art
In a bookbinding field, a commercial printing field, a card business field or a plastic molding field such as cosmetic container, printing has been performed such that a character and/or a picture image made of foil are transferred to the sheet of paper in order to give metallic appearance or a high-quality glossy image to a product, which cannot be expressed merely by common printing. In recent years, foil transferring technology has been utilized for anti-counterfeiting a cash card or a credit card and for a hologram provided for a security.
As the foil transferring technology, for example, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. S62-255184 discloses a thermal transfer printing apparatus in which a foil sheet having a foil layer on a film base member is placed on base material having a toner image for electrostatic copying while the foil layer overlaps the toner image to each other and by applying any pressure on them from above and heating them, the foil layer is transferred to the toner image.
Further, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. S63-286399 discloses a foil image forming method for forming the foil image. In this method, a toner image is formed on a sheet, a color foil is applied thereto using a thermo compression bonding, and a foil image is transferred to supporting medium using the color foil in which a color layer of the contacting portion thereof with the toner image is removed from a foil main body. Namely, in this foil image forming method, an foil image is formed by the following steps of: (1) A negative image in which an original image is reversed is copied to form a negative image copy; (2) Plastic foil for foil-stamping is stamped to the negative image copy using a thermo compression bonding; (3) By then removing them from each other, a color layer of a toner contacting portion is adhered onto the negative image copy and remained thereon; (4) A positive image of the original image is thus formed on the plastic foil for foil-stamping; and (5) The positive image of the original image is stamped to supporting medium such as polyvinyl chloride sheet using a thermo transfer printing.